Literature
How not to run a literary festival
Gstaad A friend of mine who lives here wants to start a literary festival and asked me if I had…
Lydia Davis, like an inspirational teacher, tempts her readers into more reading
A good indicator of just how interesting and alluring Lydia Davis’s Essays proved might be my recent credit card statement.…
Where are Yeats, Eliot and Plath in a new survey of 20th-century poetry?
Shelley famously and optimistically proclaimed that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Adorno famously and pessimistically declared that…
Fame made Gabriel García Márquez a pedantic bore
Gerald Martin’s titanic biography of 2010, Gabriel García Márquez: A Life, was the product of 17 years of research and…
Writing as revenge: Memories of the Future, by Siri Hustvedt, reviewed
Why are people interested in their past? One possible reason is that you can interact with it, recruiting it as…
Critical injuries: the perils of book reviews
A decade ago, a publisher produced a set of short biographies of Britain’s 20th-century prime ministers, which I reviewed unenthusiastically.…
The two works of fiction I re-read annually
Long ago, I interviewed Edmund White and found that the photographer assigned to the job was the incomparable Jane Bown…
Who really wants to read feminist children’s books?
A friend of mine who commissions book reviews has added a sub-category to the list of titles coming up: ‘femtrend’,…
How I write
How do they do it? Among writers, the earnest audience member at a literary festival who asks, ‘Do you write…
What I’ve learned reciting poems in the street
What I’ve learned from reciting verse in the street
Aphorisms and the arts: from Aristotle to Oscar Wilde
The author of this jam-packed treasure trove has been a film critic at the New York Times since 2000 and…
Autumn, season of conkers and new boots
Each year when I see the first conker of the autumn I think: fire up the ancestral ovens! This incendiary…
Meet the librarians – and book borrowers – of the Calais Jungle
In the middle of the Calais migrant camp, there is a book-filled haven of peace
Rain, shine and the human imagination — from Adam and Eve to David Hockney
‘Pray don’t talk to me about the weather, Mr Worthing,’ pleads Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest. ‘Whenever people…
There’s something about Mary (Wollstonecraft and Shelley)
If Mary Wollstonecraft, as she once declared, ‘was not born to tred in the beaten track’, the same with even…
The prophet Tolstoy and his dodgy vicar
One fine day in June 1896, a lone Russian nihilist visited Leo Tolstoy on his country estate. Come to hear…
Churchill was as mad as a badger. We should all be thankful
The egotistical Churchill may have viewed the second world war as pure theatre, but that was exactly what was needed at the time, says Sam Leith
Is any kind of sex still taboo in literature?
Is there any kind of love that novelists still can’t touch?
Ian Buruma’s notebook: Teenagers discover Montaigne the blogger
Bard College in upstate New York, where I teach in the spring semester, is an interesting institution, once better known…
By the book: The NSA is behaving like a villain in a 1950s novel
The continuing drip-feed of stories about governments and friendly-seeming internet giants sifting through our data has left some citizens feeling…
Breakdowns, suicide attempts — and four great novels
Among the clever young Australians who came over here in the 1960s to find themselves and make their mark, a…
'Where are the happy fictional spinsters?'
This book arose from an argument. Lifelong bookworm Samantha Ellis and her best friend had gone to Brontë country and…
Look! Shakespeare! Wow! George Eliot! Criminy! Jane Austen!
Among the precursors to this breezy little book are, in form, the likes of The Story of Art, Our Island…
Lose weight the Muriel Spark way
Those of you dieting your way to a svelte physique amid the flesh-exposing terrors of summer should take courage from…
Mind your language: The springs before the Arab Spring
Two hundred and forty-years ago next Tuesday, Thomas Gray was buried in his mother’s grave in Stoke Poges churchyard. In…
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